Word: sugar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Patti LaBelle, a recent guest on Emeril Live. On a typical installment of Molto Mario a couple of weeks ago, the only guests were three quiet friends of Batali's, who never once cheered but instead asked about the struffoli (drab Italian pastries), "Would you want to use powdered sugar on these?" To which Batali's answer was no, unless you want to depart from the simple greatness of Neapolitan cooking. Lagasse would have upturned a whole box of the sweet stuff, and those in his studio audience would have leapt from their seats in ecstasy...
...Next, the bus heads off to a mountain area called Sugar Loaf (the tour guide helpfully informs us that it's so named because early explorers thought it "looked like a loaf of sugar"). I gradually tune her out and I try to use what I've seen to come up with a deep think. When Jobim helped launch the bossa nova boom in 1956, it was considered a radical new style, upsetting to the samba-ruled old order. The "new way" (one translation of "bossa nova") was smooth, stripped-down music, but full of strange harmonies and unusual syncopation...
...reach Sugar Loaf and take a car suspended by cables to a lower peak, called Morro da Urca. It's a pretty exotic name, I decide, for a place that has the cheesy Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas adventure comedy "Romancing the Stone" playing on the television in the bar next to the gift shop. We take another car to a second, higher peak. I find out that Portuguese explorers thought the peaks looked like the clay molds used to press sugar into conical lumps, so they called the place Sugar Loaf; plus they mispronounced the original Indian name. Whatever the Indian...
...From the peak of Sugar Loaf (which is 1,299 feet high) you can see all of Rio, as well as the neighboring peak of Corcovado, the famous mountain with the huge statue at its peak of Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) with his arms stretched out like he's welcoming you home after a lifetime of really screwing up big time. The statue is visible from pretty much everywhere in Rio. Corcovado inspired Jobim to write the song of the same name (called "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars" in English), which even today endures as one of the finest...
...SUGAR COATING Sometimes timing really is everything. A blood test used to screen for Type 2 diabetes may miss as many as half of all cases if it's performed in the afternoon rather than the morning. Turns out glucose levels--normal is considered below 125mg/dl--naturally drop through the day, so what appears fine in the afternoon may, in fact, be a problem. Easy solution: lower the standard for what's "normal" for blood drawn...